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Do you struggle to make the time to keep up with a garden?
Do you have trouble keeping plants alive or find it to complicated to care for most garden vegetables?
This week I’d like to showcase how easy gardening can be! Contrary to most gardening influencers, it can be very easy.
Here are my top recommendations for plants to incorporate into your garden. This is not an exhaustive list but I tried to include a ton of options! This also doesn’t at all mean you can’t or shouldn’t have annual vegetables.
These are just options to make your life a bit easier and the garden less overwhelming!
Fruit Trees
Fruit trees are one of the best investments you can make in the garden. People often treat fruit trees as plants they’ll get around to learning after mastering the basics of vegetable gardening, but I think they are actually better for beginners than many of the common vegetables are.
Fruit trees will produce an incredible amount of food for the amount of work you put into growing them. Most trees in the right context can produce huge yields with only an annual pruning (if that!)
This apple tree for example produces so many apples every season that we can never collect all of them. This tree is also completely neglected and lives in near-wild conditions!
Be aware though, not every fruit or fruit variety will do well for you. This is crucial!
In my area cherries, plums, nectarines, and peaches tend to have a lot of diseases so finding a variety (or growing one adapted to local conditions) is the only way I can grow them without a constant battle.
Examples of fruit trees to explore include:
Our herbs and leafy greens coming up back in the early spring
Herbs
Herbs are a great option for beginners or people with very little time.
This plant group just keeps on giving and producing with minimal (if any) care every season!
Common herbs thrive in drier soils and are generally easy to propagate. This means that if you ever want more plants, it is easy to create more!
It is also well-worth searching up native wild herbs and growing those as well since they will do well in whatever local conditions you have.
Examples include:
Rosemary
Sage
Thyme
Oregano
Majoram
Mints
Basil
Lavender
Echinacea (native to Michigan)
Chamomile
Alliums are plants in the onion family. These are not only very healthy, but also add a ton of flavor to meals, and can serve as a pollinator plant as well as a form of pest control!
There are so many wonderful options for alliums in the garden, and you don’t even need to grow a lot to fill your space with enough for regular food.
Not every allium is a perennial, so here are a few very low maintenance perennial alliums:
Chives
Walking Onions
Scallions
Potato/Multiplier Onions
Walking onions
Berries
I used to be sad as a kid that we couldn’t grow mangoes and bananas up where I live. I was dramatically underestimating how many incredible fruits we can grow up here.
Berry plants tend to be easy to grow with (once again) very little care or maintenance. I recommend doing a heavy mulch on every woody perennial to minimize your effort even more!
Some berry plants I highly recommend are:
Raspberries (black, gold, red)
Blackberries
Thimbleberries
Cane fruit hybrids (tayberry, boysenberry, loganberry etc)
Currants (red, black, pink, white)
Honeyberries
Goji berries
Any of these will provide a kick of flavor for either snacking on, baking with, or at least a good number of medicinal qualities to appreciate.
Wild blackberries
Rhubarb
Rhubarb is one that I’ll have to write about when I get better yields off of ours. (We have stressed out our plants too much and now they are in mostly shade which doesn’t give them a lot of growth).
This is a versatile stem vegetable that has a delightfully tart flavor which makes it suitable for baking and cooking with!
For me this plant is kind of a no-brainer since I do nothing to it and still get food from it.
Rhubarb
Perennial Greens
Most people think of lettuce and spinach when they think of leafy greens. While these are the common salad staples, these are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what could be eaten!
I have only had the pleasure of working with a few of these examples, but the ones I have worked with are pretty fun and can basically all be used the same way:
Dock - sorrels, yellow dock, curly dock etc (bitter greens)
Good-King-Henry (spinach alternative)
Sea Kale
Basswood leaves
Watercress (peppery spicey flavor)
Lovage (like celery but better)
Bloody dock sorrel
Nut trees
Nut trees can be an incredible addition to your garden or homestead! Not only are they extremely nutrient dense, but they are also fairly easy to grow.
Some nut varieties might experience more severe pest or disease issues depending on your area so I recommend picking species and varieties that will do well in your specific ecoregion.
Mark Shepard, a farmer from Wisconsin, has actually worked to breed hardy and resistant nut trees that do well in his climate and has had great success! If you are interested in ordering in bulk, he sells all kinds of things in the fall on his website.
One of the only hard parts of growing nuts is the processing. I recommend getting a good nutcracker and mill for making flour as they can be hard to do any other way.
Nut trees I recommend looking into:
Pecans
Butternuts (white walnut)
Hickory nuts
Acorns
Chestnuts
Hazelnuts
Black Walnut
Edible Flowers
Edible flowers serve multiple functions: they attract pollinators or deter pests, and can be highly medicinal and edible.
There are A LOT of edible flowers for so many climates, but here are a few common examples:
Violet
Bonus: Self-sowing annuals:
Some plants are both easy to grow and are, for our purposes, essentially a perennial (despite technically being an annual or biennial).
Any plants that easily self-seed and pop up every year can be treated as if it were an annual in the garden and serves a similar purpose!
Here are some additional plants to consider in your perennial-dominant landscape:
Chard
Cilantro
Bonus: Perennialized annuals:
And as a final bonus, there are some annuals that you can almost treat like a perennial based on the way you care for them.
This might include covering a plant or leaving some of it to stay dormant in the ground until spring. Here are a few ideas:
Potatoes
Sweet potatoes
Garlic
Peppers (require covering or bringing indoors)
Well that was a pretty extensive list, I hope you found something useful!
Growing many of the crops listed above (as well as whatever other crops that might be region-specific) might just be the saving grace you need to keep a low-maintenance garden and feed yourself well!
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